• Come together each month in a highly contested, winner-takes-all competition.
• Each tournament features a unique theme, with decorated environments and soundscapes.
• Three brand new cosmetic items to earn in every tournament, including standout table items and clothing.
• Winners will be immortalised in the “Hall of Fame” a leaderboard specifically tracking tournament victors.

Blackjack’s Treasure Hoard

The first of our monthly tournaments, Blackjack’s Treasure Hoard is a pirate-themed event taking place in the Casino D’Oro. We’ve packed out the venue with what’s left of his crew who’ll get you into the spirit with their selection of sea shanties. Can you be the first to get your hands on the hoard and earn your place in the Hall of Fame?

Chip Store

• Pick up your free bundle and show everyone at the table that with 100k extra chips in your bag and your new hat, you don’t give a cluck.
• Boost your balance with a selection of chip packs with the brand new chip store.
• Browse a range of heavily discounted bundles for a burst of additional chips as well as some glorious shining gold cosmetics.

Price Drop

It’s really important to us that our players have the best possible experience when playing Poker Club. Listening to all of your feedback, we understand that one of the biggest factors in this is having as many players as possible at the table.

To help with this we are dropping the price of Poker Club to £15.99/$19.99 So if you have friends who were thinking about picking it up, now is the perfect chance to get them involved!


Loyalty / Founders Bundle

As part of this update, everyone who already has a Poker Club account will receive a special Founders Bundle sent directly to their account. This contains a unique, never to be seen again item marking you as a “Legend” and founder of the game, as well as another hefty boost to your chip balance.

Additional changes

• Improved spectator mode allowing the spectator host to easily see all cards in the game and cycle between players perspectives.
• In-game messaging improvements via splash screens.
• Improvements to tournament UI.
• Improvements to rewards screens.
• Bug fixes and stability improvements.

The post Tournaments Update – Available Now on all Platforms appeared first on Poker Club.

As the definitive poker game on console, we want Poker Club to embody the heated head-to-head game of poker that we all know and love. What better way is there to do that than by bringing every player together each month in a highly contested, winner-takes-all competition!

Tournaments will offer a new level of competition in Poker Club and give you the opportunity to prove your skills in specific event types at the highest level, with Finals taking place every week.

As the overall winner of a tournament, you’ll not only earn big pay-outs and a standout trophy to show off at the table, you’ll also be permanently recognized in our brand new Hall of Fame. Your name will be up there in lights for everyone else to see!


So how do the tournaments work?

Every month you’ll find two new tabs on your tournaments screen, a Qualifier and a Final for whichever tournament is running. Qualifiers run throughout the week, so as long as you have the cash, there are plenty of chances to enter. By competing in and winning a Qualifier you’ll earn an awesome themed prize as well as a coveted ticket to the final.

If you’ve managed to earn a ticket before the Final comes around on Saturday, you can spend that ticket to enter the tournament. Every Finals competitor will earn another unique item, just for making it that far, but show your skills and come out on top and you’ll walk away with both the trophy and a place in the Hall of Fame. If you enter the Final and lose… well it’s back to the qualifiers to try and earn a new ticket before next weekend.

Starting on the first of each month, there will be a brand new tournament, each with its own unique theme. Here’s a sneak peek at what’s on the cards for the next few months. We think you might be able to guess the theme for December

That’s all for this first preview of the upcoming Tournaments Update! Have we got you excited to take on this new competitive environment? Do you think you might be staking a claim on our Hall of Fame? Join us on Discord and let us know what you think, or ask us any questions that you have about this exciting new addition to the game.

The post Update Preview – Monthly Competitive Tournaments appeared first on Poker Club.

Each monthly tournament has two elements, the qualifier and the final. Qualifiers run all week and allow you to earn your way into the final, with each win giving you a ticket that provides entry to the final event. The finals themselves will play out on Saturday, with only one chance a week to compete before that tournament disappears at the end of the month!

As well as a great chance to show off your skills against other players in Poker Club’s most competitive element to date, these tournaments will all provide unique prizes. There will be exclusive collectables every month as well as a Hall of Fame, giving you a chance to be memorialised in the game for your poker prowess! Do you think you have the skills to come out on top?


What do you think about monthly tournaments? Are you aiming to be our first winner? Join us on Discord and let us know!

The post Dev Diary – Monthly Tournaments appeared first on Poker Club.

We want every showdown to be exciting, keeping you immersed as the tension builds up and the winning cards are revealed! To do this we’ve focused on optimising two key features of the showdown: the reveal and the winning hand.

The reveal now allows you to easily track the cards that each of your opponents turns over, building suspense with each new piece of information. These are neatly displayed against each players name on the player list, making sure there’s no confusion over what’s on the table and allowing you to see how your hand stacks up against your rivals.

On the winning hand, we have focused on ensuring absolute clarity. The UI will now clearly display the winning player’s hole cards alongside the community cards, and then highlight the 5 cards that make up the winning hand.

More Human Players

One of the biggest areas of feedback that we get from our community is that, where possible, you’d like to play more against other players and less against AI. We’re aiming to deliver on this through a range of additions, that will give you more opportunities to fill your tables with real players. These include:

• Improved matchmaking across all events, including PCC Tour.
• The AI will give up seats at cash tables whenever a new player joins.
• Friend invites for all systems getting more players into your game.
• Invite codes for every table, meaning that you can easily fill the extra seats 
• New custom game features, giving you the tools to create your own events, with or without bots.
• We’ll also be trialling new events with no AI at the table, so make sure to get involved and let us know what you think!

When you’re taking on the PCC Tour there will always be a higher chance of AI at the table. With its massive range of events, there are often thousands of tables to fill and our priority is giving every player action in whichever event they choose to play.  We’re committed to making sure that every game is a rewarding and enjoyable experience no matter the mix of players and AI. If you’re curious about how AI players make their decisions, check out the AI Dev Diaries to see what goes on behind the scenes!

If you’d prefer to stay away from AI players altogether, make sure to get involved with tournaments and daily tables or consider setting up your own custom games! Join us on Discord and link up with other community members to keep your tables packed out.

Keep your eyes peeled for the next teaser for the River, in which we’ll be looking at “Poker Nights”.

The post The River – Gameplay Upgrades appeared first on Poker Club.

What is Tilt?

Tilt is a bad state of mind that can lead you to make a lot of mistakes, usually brought about through frustration. In poker, this commonly shows up as a desperate play style aimed at scrabbling to retrieve chips after a big loss, or simply throwing chips away to vent anger.

     

Recognise the causes

Poker is a unique game that takes a mix of luck and skill, blending them into a competitive environment where you’ll need a bit of both if you want to come out on top. When these two things don’t line up, it can be easy to lose your cool. 

One of the most common causes of tilt is a “bad beat”. This is a situation in which your high ranking hand loses out to someone with an even better hand, usually, after you’ve confidently invested plenty in the pot. 

Worse than this is the sting of losing out to a worse hand which your opponent really had no right playing. If you’ve ever raised the pot with pocket aces, just to lose to someone across the table who was bluffing an unsuited 2 7 and somehow hit a full house, you’ve probably felt the vicious bite of bad luck.

Another major cause of bad luck related tilt is being consistently card-dead. A continuous stream of bad starting hands, bad flops and draws that just won’t come in, could cause even the most patient player to throw in the towel. This is tilt water torture, drip, drip, dripping until you start bluffing hands just out of a want to actually play the game.

Manage Your Tilt

Tilt is an unavoidable part of poker and even the calmest among us experience it from time to time, so the most important thing is knowing how to deal with it.

The number one solution is to slow down, take a break and maybe even sit out of a few hands or grab yourself a drink. Settle your emotions, collect your cool. Observe the game for a few hands with a new perspective while you collect your cool.

If you come back to the table and you still feel like you’re in a bad state of mind, consider moving to another table, or play a different type of Hold’em to reset your focus.

Sometimes leaving isn’t an option. In these situations, you need to address the mindset at the table. Sit back and relax for a second, put on a video or some music that you like in the background and think about how you are going to play going forward. Always avoid thinking about what’s happened up to this point.

If you’re all about the numbers, another great option is to check out a poker odds calculator, to see how bad a “bad beat” actually was. Knowing that your hand would only have won one in every three times can be a great pallet cleanser and help to get you back on track.

Did you find this guide helpful? How do you manage tilt? We’d love to hear your strategies and stories. Share them with us on Facebook and Twitter with the #PokerClub.

The post How to Manage Your Tilt appeared first on Poker Club.

The showdown is the end to a round of poker, in which any remaining players show and compare their hands to determine the winner(s). In Poker Club we break this up into two main stages; the reveal, in which each remaining player takes turns showing their hand, and the winning hand, at which point we find out who won the round.

When designing showdowns we have three key elements in mind; efficiency, clarity and excitement. We want this to be a fun ending to any round, building tension while keeping pace, where it’s always clear who won and why. All images and current design are WIP and are subject to change before release.

The reveal

Our first step is speeding up the entire process, keeping you in the game with fewer pauses and more action. During the reveal, the camera no longer switches to top-down, instead, you’ll see each player turn over their cards which will also be recorded against their position in the player list on the right.

The community cards are always visible in the bottom left, making it easier to read the game, no matter where you sit, or which camera you choose.  (We’ll cover this in more detail in an upcoming dev diary!)

Winning Hands

The key focus for us here is simply ensuring that the winning hand is always crystal clear.

When there is a single winner, the camera will frame the winner and the UI will clearly show their hole cards alongside the community cards, then call out the winning hand.

In a situation where there is a split or side pot, there is a very similar process. All of the winning hands will be displayed, again highlighting which cards are used from both the community and hole cards, as well as the result they got and how many chips are won from the pot. This also keeps the results clear and concise on one screen, speeding up the process.

That’s it for this Dev Diary, thank you for reading and we hope you’re excited to get a sneak peek at some of the awesome updates coming to Poker Club! This is just the first in a series of changes, so keep your eyes peeled for upcoming Dev Diaries, to see what else is in the works.

Do you want to be part of our community of players, actively helping to shape the future of the game? Join us on Discord and share your ideas and feedback with us.

The post Dev Diary – Improving the Showdown appeared first on Poker Club.

The upcoming update will see the introduction of custom private multi-table tournaments, giving you full control to create your own shootouts and freezeouts at any buy-in, and choose whether you want bots or real players only. You will be able to create either shootouts for up to 36 players or freezeouts for up to 60. 

Our aim with the design of this feature was to allow players to create the games and experiences that they want to create. These private multi-table tournaments provide an opportunity to host much bigger competitions with more people to play against.

We’re really excited to empower community groups to come together and host their own competitive challenges, as well as opening up some great opportunities for future events.

That’s it for this Dev Diary, going forward we’re still focused on updates and improvements to Poker Club! Check out our latest status update to catch up with some of our upcoming plans and keep your eyes peeled for our next Dev Diary!

We’d love to hear your feedback on how you plan to use these multi-table tournaments, do you already have a big community that you’ll be playing them with? Join us on Discord and share your ideas and feedback with us.

The post Dev Diary – Private MTTs appeared first on Poker Club.

We hope you’re all safe and enjoying Poker Club! Lockdown here in the UK may be keeping most of us out of the office, we’re still hard at work from home preparing our next set of updates, collecting all of your feedback and shaping our roadmap for the year ahead.

Today we’d like to share some of the improvements that are coming in our next few game updates alongside the areas we are focusing on in our longer-term plans for the future of Poker Club. Live development cycles mean that timelines can change, but we would still like to keep you up to date with our current plans.

If you want to follow our progress you can stay up to date with the latest Poker Club updates from our team over on Discord and share your feedback with us using our Player Feedback Form. Additionally this year we will also be introducing a new form of Dev Diaries. These will be a great opportunity to see what we are working on and as a bonus get an insight into the types of thoughts and procedures that go into updating or creating a new feature.

If you have shared feedback with us already, we can’t thank you enough for taking the time to do so. It helps us to prioritise updates, helps our team to investigate efficiently and ensures that you have a direct line to the team when required. We hope that as you read through some of the changes coming up, you will see your own feedback reflected in them.

Upcoming Updates

We’re looking forward to releasing our first update of the year, which we are currently optimizing and testing ready for release. Here are some of the things that you can expect to see. 

• Private multi-table tournaments – We received a lot of feedback, going all the way back to pre-release, that these were something that you really felt the game needed. We are happy to say that with the next update you’ll be able to host and join your own custom MTTs. Thank you to everyone that took the time to share your thoughts, we can’t wait to share what we’ve been working on.
• Improvements and clarification of trophies – There have been a few trophies causing confusion for those achievement hunters among you, so we’re rewording a few of them to make the requirements as clear as possible. We’re looking at you ‘Keep Your Heads Up’ and ‘Poker Showdown’!
• Additionally, the updates will have a few bug fixes as well as setting the groundwork for us to add more special events and rewards.
• Ring Reward Sequence – Celebrate your tour victory in style with a brand new animation rewarding you with your well-earned rings.

Long Term Development

As well as our short term goals, we’re looking to implement some important changes to the game based on your feedback. Since launch, we’ve been collecting your feedback on the AI and UI of Poker Club. A huge thanks to everyone who took part in our focused feedback sessions over on Discord, or just shared their thoughts on one of our social channels, for helping to form this discussion. These are two fundamental elements of the game and we’re keen to get them just right. We’ll be keeping you up to date as these shape up, as well as continuing to collect feedback going forward.

We know that some of you are still experiencing the occasional crash or disconnection and thanks to the reports on the player feedback form, we are eliminating the causes of these, one by one. A stable game is key and so this continues to be a major focus for us going forward.

As always thank you to every single one of you for your ongoing support and patience. It’s fantastic to see all of your feedback and ideas and it really helps us as we strive to make the best possible poker experience. Please continue to complete our Player Feedback Form to report any issues and to share your suggestions with us, or join us on Discord and contribute to the next discussion on upcoming events and tournaments, starting next week!

Otherwise, we hope that you all continue to stay safe and we’ll be back with further updates soon.

The post Poker Club Status Update – January 22nd appeared first on Poker Club.

An update is now available to download for Poker Club on PC and Xbox platforms. This update (1.30) brings PC and Xbox platforms in line with PlayStation platforms, which received Update 1.30 last week. Update 1.30 on PC and Xbox platforms includes:

• Graphical improvements 
• Fix for screen edge flickering
• Clearer prompt to post big blind
• Wider variation of idle animations
• Improvements to table UI
• Improvements to XP bar
• New PCC Tour Ring reward sequence
• Improved visibility of other Clubs when already in a Club
• Fixed “cancel your application” option for leaving a Club
• Fix for Bounty Hunter PlayStation trophy
• Leaderboards will now rank players based on total chips won
• Fix for exiting the game on PC

A separate hotfix (1.32) also released today on PC and PlayStation platforms to ensure full parity across all platforms and to address a crash affecting some PlayStation players.

Future Updates

This will be the last update before the new year, as our team prepare to take a break for the holidays. We’ll still be monitoring feedback and staying in touch on Discord, just a little less often than usual. We will also be asking for feedback on specific community-raised issues over on Discord during the holidays. If you haven’t already joined us on Discord but would like to contribute your feedback, you can join the Poker Club server here. You can also continue to report any issues using our Player Feedback Form, and every response will be picked up in January. All feedback is greatly appreciated and will help to feed into and prioritise further updates as we return in the new year. If you’d like more details on our future plans, we’ve shared more details in our December Status Update.

All that remains is to say happy holidays from all of us here at Ripstone. Thank you for your ongoing support and here’s to a happy and healthy 2021!

The post Status Update & 1.30 Available Now on PC & Xbox Platforms appeared first on Poker Club.

A new update is now available to download for Poker Club on PlayStation platforms. Update 1.30 includes:

• Graphical improvements 
• Fix for screen edge flickering
• Clearer prompt to post big blind
• Wider variation of idle animations
• Improvements to table UI
• Improvements to XP bar
• New PCC Tour Ring reward sequence
• Improved visibility of other Clubs when already in a Club
• Fixed “cancel your application” option for leaving a Club
• Fix for Bounty Hunter PlayStation trophy
• Leaderboards will now rank players based on total chips won

The corresponding update for PC and Xbox platforms is in the final stages of testing and we’ll share more details on release timings as soon as we can. When this update releases on PC it will also include a fix for exiting the game.

Upcoming Updates

1.30 is currently in the final stages of testing for Xbox One, Xbox Series X and PC. We’re already working on the next updates for January and beyond and you can read more about what we’re working on in our December Status Update. Thank you for your support as we continue to address community feedback and make improvements. Please continue to share your thoughts through our Player Feedback Form as every single response helps to shape our plans for future Poker Club updates.

The post Update 1.30 Available Now on PlayStation Platforms appeared first on Poker Club.